Ritchie Torres: “Both the 2020 and 2021 election cycles have been a powerful testament to the influence of the Black vote. I proudly come…”

“Both the 2020 and 2021 election cycles have been a powerful testament to the influence of the Black vote. I proudly come from New York State where we have seen a golden age of Black political power: the attorney general, the State Senate majority leader, the State assembly speaker, the mayor, are all Black. And we know that but for the Black vote, President Biden would have never won the Presidency, and the Democrats never would have won a majority in the Senate. And the attempts at voter suppression that we have seen threatens to reverse the racial progress that has been made. Increasingly, we are becoming a multiracial democracy. You know, 70 percent of the Democratic Caucus consists of people of color, women, and members of the LGBTQ community. But you would never know that from the structure of the Senate. The structure of the Senate concentrates power in a small subset of States that are much Whiter, much more rural, much more conservative than the rest of the country. Before the Democratic party won the Senate in 2021, the Senate Republican majority represented 10 to 15 million fewer people than the Senate Democratic minority. And the problem is that the filibuster takes the undemocratic structure of the Senate to an even greater extreme. The notion that one Senator, who represents a State smaller than our congressional districts, should have the power to overturn the will of the President and the Senate and the House, is profoundly undemocratic.…”